Photo as tweeted by DigitasLBiAffiliates
We recently hosted a travel-oriented educational seminar in London featuring key speakers from Hotels.com, Hostelworld.com, Skyscanner, and vakay.co.uk. There were some interesting discussions and we wanted to share some takeaways that may apply to everyone in the performance marketing space.
Hostelworld.com
Hostelworld reviewed and streamlined 2000+ partners down to 127 without seeing any impact to topline revenue. They discussed how fractional commissioning that reflects an increasingly complex customer journey can incentivize partners across the funnel.
Key takeaway:
Hostelworld’s experience reinforces the value of top partners and the importance of quality over quantity. The number of partners in a program can be more of a vanity metric than anything else—what really matters is making the most of the key partners driving meaningful volumes of sales.
Skyscanner
Skyscanner is well known for their consumer facing business. The presentation described how insights from Skyscanner’s engagement data is used by travel brands and how the powerful data informs their decision-making. For example, identifying where demand exceeded supply led Ryanair to open new routes from Glasgow.
Key takeaway:
The power of first-party data for brands rests on their ability to ingest, analyze and learn from data at scale. But in order to be valuable, the right data points need to be collected and at scale. Subsequently, the data should be consumed and analyzed by the travel brands’ marketing teams and then translated into actions.
Finally, here are some fascinating statistics from Hotels.com. Big surprise for us were the huge year-to-year swings in the “Club Sandwich” index – showing a deal can be had in surprising places!
